Trump says he is deserving of ‘reparations,’ calls Obama presidency ‘corrupt’
TheGrio...
Reparations advocates say Trump’s remarks undermine the longstanding movement seeking redress for descendants of enslaved Black Americans.
While defending his administration’s now failed $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund, President Donald Trump said he is deserving of “reparations” and accused the former presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden of being “corrupt.”
“They went after me. And what they did here was very, frankly, if you talk about reparations or if you talk about payment, what they did to me, I had a very good case against them,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday.
The twice impeached, convicted U.S. president decried the Justice Department’s rescission of the controversial anti-weaponization fund, created as a result of a settlement of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS.
“These people were treated horribly, and this fund could have given them some solace,” said Trump.
On Sunday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche affirmed in a letter to U.S. senators that the DOJ fund was dead. A few Republican senators threatened to tank Blanche’s confirmation as the next U.S. Attorney General if he did not affirm in writing that the fund would no longer move forward.
Last month, a federal judge admonished the settlement as “self-dealing,” given that Trump, as head of the executive branch, essentially settled a lawsuit against himself. The president sued the IRS in January over leaks of his tax returns from 2017 to 2020, which showed he and his family evaded up to $500 million in federal taxes over the span of years.
In the Oval, Trump dismissed concerns about his taxes, calling it a 10-year-old case that was settled with the IRS. He asserted that the federal government “terminated” the settlement after he announced his 2016 presidential run. However, during the 2016 presidential election cycle, Trump repeatedly said he was under audit whenever asked to disclose his tax returns. He became the first presidential candidate in modern history not to do so.
Despite his claims of being weaponized by the federal government over his tax returns being leaked to the public, Trump was president at the time of the leaks. The president clarified that he would not have received any portion of the $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund, but rather that individuals targeted by the Obama and Biden administrations would have.
“It’s for…people that have been treated unfairly, that have been weaponized by a corrupt government, that we had with Obama, that we had with Biden. You had a corrupt government with both of them,” said Trump.
Activists have taken issue with supporters of the Trump administration fund referring to it as “reparations,” arguing that it is insulting to the decades-long movement to enact reparations for descendants of Black people enslaved for hundreds of years of U.S. chattel slavery.
In response to Trump’s remarks, Dreisen Health, a longtime reparations researcher and founder of Why We Can’t Wait Reparations Coalition, told theGrio, “This is another example of the subversion of reparations. Reparations require a legitimate harm or a gross human rights violation — white mediocrity and white grievance do not meet that bar.”
She added, “In the month of Black August, as we honor our Black freedom fighters and continue the fight for full liberation and real reparations for Black Americans, the focus belongs on freeing and restoring Black political prisoners who have spent years behind bars, facing medical neglect and slavery-like conditions, for the crime of fighting systemic oppression and injustice.”